Historical Visitor Statistics

As a national user facility, ARM is required to report facility use for actual visitors and for active user research computer and Archive accounts and only unique scientific users will be counted. A scientific user is defined as a member of the scientific community and infrastructure who is using ARM Facilities or data to perform peer-reviewed science and research. For the ARM Infrastructure, this includes the scientists and engineers who are involved in the development of synthesis products, value-added products, instrument performance analysis, and uncertainty quantification. Unique scientific users are defined as a single use of ARM’s on-site assets, off-site services, or data services during the defined reporting period.

Beginning in fiscal year 2013, the approach used to count scientific users for ARM was revised to align with other DOE Office of Science user facilities. ARM moved away from the OPSMAX metric in FY2019 and currently uses a data availability metric that gauges what data is expected to be available in the archive against what is available. Please contact us if there are any questions related to the information presented here about the facility statistics.

Table 2 follows reporting guidance provided in FY2009 for counting ARM users. At that time, the new computations were applied to previous quarterly reports and user statistics were recalculated to count only scientific users.

*Scientific user numbers appear first; total number of users appear in the parentheses.

+ Data for the ARM Aerial Facility were not collected during this time.

Every visitor to the ARM Climate Research Facility must submit a request to visit. From that request, the following statistics in Table 3 have been summarized and the total number of visitors days are recorded.